Michael Lopp

Good morning, it’s January 19th. JANUARY. Most performance reviews have a strong recency bias. You remember the successes and failures from the last three months and use that as the foundation for the report card. This is unfair. Your team members have likely forgotten or rebranded their failures, but,

I vividly remember where I was standing when someone explained the knowledge pyramid to me. It’s called the DIKW (data, information, knowledge, wisdom) pyramid over here on Wikipedia, but when Laurie the PM scribbled it on the white board, I thought she was thinking out loud, and IT BLEW

I’m writing a draft of this piece just for the newsletter this morning. Happy Thanksgiving. Try the Pinot — it’s excellent. Sorry about the typos. January 1st is a reset. What was late in the year — cold and dark December — transforms into a fresh new beginning in January. Resolutions,

Pretty proud of this one. It was written at a time of great stress and was a therapy piece. It was a rare circumstance when the words just showed up. As a writer, this is your goal state. It’s why you spend all that time writing garbage. You’re

The next book is for senior leaders, and I spend a lot of time being very directive as opposed to my usual approach of "describe the situation and let them decide what they feel is best." Throughout the book, I'm littering these lists of seven. Why

My aptitude for a pithy saying is 100% due to Twitter. It was a required skill to jam as much meaning into as few characters as possible. The practice, unfortunately, was a precursor to our widespread, crippling collective short attention spans; it also taught me how to get to the

After writing a lot about promotions for the last two weeks, I’m certain there is a valuable book to be written on the topic. The work around promotions encapsulates many skills you need to develop as both an individual and a leader, but… someone else needs to write that

I’m dialing up the regularity of posts to the blog because, well, there are a couple of books to write. This means you’ll be hearing from me every Tuesday. It’s Tuesday. You are supposed to be reading a piece called The Wanderer, which I think you’ll